Wolfenstein's Graphics On PS4 And Xbox One Are The Same, According To Analysis

Well color me blind and walk me through a Skittle-themed minefield, it looks like one developer has worked their butts off to maintain parity for their title at all costs.

Wolfenstein: The New Order's official graphics analysis has come in courtesy of Digital Foundry and do you know what the final verdict is? The graphics are practically the same for both the Xbox One and the PlayStation 4.

It's not just that the graphics are the same, it's that the resolution for both systems is (mostly) native 1080p and it runs at a brisk 60 frames per second, all thanks to id Software's id Tech 5 engine... yep, the same engine that powered RAGE.

According to Digital Foundry, the big take away from all of the lossless parity boils down to the engine. Machine Games, the developers of the title, have made it known that the id Tech 5's scaling capabilities have enabled them to output a game that actually makes the Xbox One look like a system worth $399.

As mentioned by senior gameplay designer, Andreas Ojerfors, in an interview with Tech Radar...

"It's about creating an engine that is from the very bottom up built to scale. I think from the beginning when we got our hands on id Tech, we realised it was an engine that was built to scale very well between different platforms,"

It's not even just fluff, either. Digital Foundry's gameplay comparison footage seems to showcase a game that really does maintain its frame-rate parity across both platforms at all times, no matter what. Check it out for yourselves with the footage below.

Now, for those of you with jaded shards of fanboyism pumping through your black hearts, there is some good news for you: Digital Foundry did find an instance where the engine had to downscale the Xbox One's resolution to maintain 60fps.

Richard Leadbetter writes that...

“...there's a base 1080p native rendering resolution (unfortunately short on anti-aliasing), parity in lighting and texture work and an identical feel to the way the game plays. However, there is one interesting difference - in the comparison above, you can see an area of the game that operates at something in the region of 1440x1080 on Xbox One, while the PS4 and PC versions remain at the native 1080p resolution.”

So technically, there may be times where the engine will downscale the Xbox One to maintain 1080p and 60fps, no matter what? The problem is that this could happen dynamically, so there's no real way to know for sure when this happens. It's like stuffing a sock in your jockstrap to look bigger, but then when you go to take a shower you pop some Viagra. Your girlfriend will always think you're packing, even though you're dynamically changing sizes to keep her fooled.

Anyway, the reality is that Wolfenstein: The New Order is 1080p and 60fps on the Xbox One and PS4 (it's obviously the best on PC, but we don't need to make it known that PC just unzipped its pants and took a dirty dump over the consoles. It's just not necessary, so I'm not going to bring it up or make it known that anyone rocking SLI Titans can likely force the game to run at 4K). If you're okay with that, then you're paying $60 and getting the same game no matter what console you buy it for. For better or for worse.